Melina Mardueño Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite For

Traduciendo Mi Reflejo: Do You See Me? Melina Mardueño Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in Studio Art under the advisement of Daniela Rivera and Andrew Mowbray April 2018 © 2018 Melina Mardueño Mardueño 1 Table of Contents I. Acknowledgments II. Reflections on the Origins of my Self-Portrait III. Loss and Distance IV. Coming to Terms with Chicanidad V. Visibility and the Invisible VI. Fulano, Mengano, Zutano, and Perengano VII. Identification VIII. There I am IX. That I Painted My Hair X. Hair and Gender XI. Clothing and Self-Fashioning XII. Closing Thoughts XIII. Bibliography Mardueño 2 Acknowledgements: First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisors Andy and Daniela for encouraging me to take on a senior thesis. Despite all of my self-doubt, they built me back up and reminded me that I was just as capable as anyone else. They remind me all the time why I am grateful to have them as professors and mentors. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff Art Department for all that they do and everyone on my thesis review committee for their time. Thank you to my fellow studio art seniors and friends; especially to Natalí for all of the favors she gave me and Anjali for our inspired conversations. Thank you to my siblings for always encouraging me and especially my brother Francisco for collecting so much of my material for me over the course of the year. To my mother and father, thank you for giving me the opportunity to become who I am. Gracias por apoyarme aunque me fui tan lejos. No nos vamos a arrepentir. Mardueño 3 Initial thoughts: This body of work deals with self-portraiture and self-fashioning, lineage, representation, reflection, as well as mechanical and handmade reproduction. I have made one large drawing consisting of four life-size self-portraits, two videos, and four sweaters. The self-portrait of four is titled Fulano, Mengano, Zutano, and Perengano (Self-Portrait), names which are frequently in Spanish used to denote someone unknown. In this self-portrait, I have drawn myself four times, over four different days. The videos, There I am and That I Painted my Hair, deal with the way I change myself and create my image although the latter deals with the cultural repercussions of breaking the mold. The last piece I made was a set of four sweaters titled, Do You See Me? These are white sweaters that I made with my mother with the title flocked onto them with my hair. This is an analysis of categorization and the inability to record experience or identity through simple or symbolic representations. Ironically, my work perpetuates that issue. The idea for this thesis came from various sources. My older work mostly consisted of drawing, so I started with self-portraits. At the same time, I began creating videos about myself, and they seemed to fit well with what I wanted to say through this project. I was concerned with representation of people like me, but I wanted to distinguish myself as a subject worth portraying without having to resort to stereotypes. Since the summer of 2017, I worked as a curatorial intern and assistant at the Davis Museum in Wellesley, MA. One of my responsibilities was to write justifications on new acquisitions for the collection. This consisted of researching and writing a short document about the newly acquired artwork and the artist. These justifications I wrote as a curatorial assistant also influenced this thesis because I came into contact with artists unknown to me. Many of the contemporary Mexican-American artists I researched were dealing with similar themes. Shizu Saldamando, who felt she could not relate to the people represented in popular Mardueño 4 media, set out to portray the people she felt connected to. Working from photographs she takes herself, she draws and paints her subjects as they are, acknowledging that their identity as punks and people of color is still present in their clothes and bodies.1 Then there is the performance group Asco from the 1980s that also criticized big art institutions and the Chicano art movement for their restrictive portrayal of Chicanxs.2 With self-representation, I did not want to have to be blatantly direct about what or who I am. I do not want to fall into the repetition of some of the stereotypes that say, “Look at me, I’m a Xicanx artist! Look at my brown skin! And my indigenous culture! Fuck the colonizer!” Maybe some of those sentiments are there, but it’s not something that I bluntly say with every encounter. I wanted to present myself as I believe I am, and have viewers wonder for themselves where I fall. I know who I am, and I think people like me will know who I am, too. This is an investigation of me and of how I portray and represent myself. 1 Carren Jao, “Counter Cliché: The Asian and Latino Bi-Cultural Experience,” KCET, May 28, 2013, https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/counter-cliche-the-asian-and-latino-bi-cultural-experience. 2 C. Ondine Chavoya et al., eds., Asco: Elite of the Obscure: A Retrospective, 1972-1987 (Ostfildern, Germany : [Williamstown, Mass.] : [Los Angeles]: Hatje Cantz ; Williams College Museum of Art ; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011). Mardueño 5 Figure 1 Photograph of studio space with charcoal self-portraits. Reflections on the Origins of my Self-Portrait: The most obvious answer to why I chose myself as the subject of my artwork is accessibility. I am available to myself whenever I feel like I need to draw or work on any piece. I also don’t like to be watched when I am working. I hesitate, and I constantly wonder if I am being judged or critiqued. I feel a gaze over my shoulder and on my back, and I can no longer function. Am I ashamed of the implied narcissism? Do you see me seeing myself in the mirror? My studio walls are covered in drawings of myself. It feels like I have been caught in the middle of a forbidden act: reproducing myself with a mirror and my hand. Mardueño 6 Figure 2 Photograph of studio space with charcoal self-portraits -- I occasionally stare at myself in the mirror and wonder who that person is. I do not recognize her all the time, and sometimes I see her as a different body apart from mine. All of a sudden, I will feel like I am not the one looking. There is a realization that my reflection will look back at me, too. When I draw in the studio, I imagine myself as a translator of the image in the mirror to a drawing on paper. -- As an art history and studio art double-major, I have rarely felt like I have seen art about people like me except in a class about Post-Conquest Mexico, but I still never felt like they were actually like me. If anything, that relates to my parents. I was not born in Mexico. I do not dress like them, or wear my hair in the same way. I do not want to see Diego Rivera’s idyllic Mardueño 7 campesinos or Frida Kahlo playing dress-up in Tehuana clothing. I reject the performance of indigeneity and the concealment of European blood in mestizos. We can fucking see it. -- I once asked my mother what we were (racially), and I remember she couldn’t really answer me. She said we were Mexican, but what does that mean? I know what it means. I reject mestizaje as José Vasconcelos’ cosmic race, “la raza.”3 Mexico adores its mestizaje, or mix of indigenous and Spanish race and culture. They fully embrace their hybridity as the epitome of Mexico, yet the hierarchy of race and color still exists. My mom said we’re not white. In Marilyn Grace Miller’s critique of The Cosmic Race, she discusses how Chicanos and Chicanas have appropriated the ideologies of The Cosmic Race, and so it has become “an icon of Chicano identity that is revered without being understood or sufficiently questioned,” because it fits the narrative of the justification of the mestizo in the United States.4 I understand the need to want to be validated because I want that for myself, but do I belong here more than white Americans do? I do not think all Chicanxs deserve to be here in the United States more than anyone else, and I laugh at the idea of Aztlan. Yes, borders are man-made. I know about the border. I could not visit Mexico until I could get a passport without a parental signature. Regardless of being descended from indigenous people, if we, Chicanxs, are worried about colonization, we must ask why we think we can occupy the land on which the United States is formed since we don’t belong to the nations that were there first. 3 Marilyn Grace Miller, “José Vasconcelos’ About-Face on the Cosmic Race,” in Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America, 1st. ed (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 36, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/well/detail.action?docID=3443153. 4 Miller, 38. Mardueño 8 Identity and the Desire to be Identified: Identity is, and always will be, a source of anger for me. While I feel like I am this way a majority of the time, identity brings out the worst in me, and it frustrates me. I do not feel connected to a history or a place.

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